


25 American Horror Stories

by TheLostChimera



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Cult
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, F/F, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Isolation, M/M, Misogyny, Multi, Psychological Trauma, Racism, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-18 16:28:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29371590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLostChimera/pseuds/TheLostChimera
Summary: A series of stories from the AHS-verse released over time. Canon-compliant, often character studies.Chapter One: Kai Anderson dies, and then he wakes up.
Relationships: Winter Anderson/Ivy Mayfair-Richards
Kudos: 3





	25 American Horror Stories

_For all I know_

_The best is over and the worst is yet to come_

_Is it enough_

_To keep on hoping when the rest have given up?_

_\- “Told You So” by Paramore_

_“There is something more dangerous in this world than a humiliated man: a nasty woman.”_

Those were the last words Kai Anderson heard, and then the world cut to black with a boom. Actually, to be more exact, it wasn’t so much of a boom as it was a split second roar and then absolute silence, and it wasn’t so much black as it was an absolute abyss. It wasn’t the lack of sound and light, but instead the absence of hearing and sight.

Even the sensation of touch seemed to have left him. It was as if the world itself had blinked out of existence. He was set adrift, floating more as a dazed consciousness that anything corporeal, and time seemed to lose meaning with everything else. Then, after what could have been eons or moments, he was again standing there on the stage of the debate hall, which was now dark and totally empty.

All the rage and indignation that had been burning in his gut was blown away by his jarring vacation from reality. It was like light had flooded a pitch black room, but in a metaphysical sense. The whole world had rushed into the empty vacuum he’d fallen into, and his mind was lagging behind him. Filled with a feeling akin to vertigo, he stumbled to the floor, his head between his knees, and he tried to pick up the thoughts that seemed to have been almost literally blasted out of his skull.

Slowly, each piece began to click into place, collectively painting a very bloody picture. Numerous people dead at his hands or his command. The bodies of his followers likewise laying in a pile in his wake. His brother’s blood staining his skin. His sister’s pulse fading to nothing beneath his fingers. Months locked away in a prison while his enemies prospered outside those walls. The blazing fires of revolution withered away to faint embers. And then the final attempt at reigniting them ending with a smug smile and a sharp crack in the air behind him.

What had that been?

As his thoughts steadied themselves, the anger began to spark back up as well. Those bitches Ally and Beverly, Judases of mythic proportions, still had to pay. With a sense of purpose to anchor him back to reality, he rose, leapt from the stage, and marched down the aisle and out of the debate hall. He strode through the halls, retracing the path he’d taken into the building, and soon enough he was at the glass double doors that formed the entrance.

Through the glass he could see the first rays of sunrise shining through. It had been just a little after nightfall when he’d entered the building. Confused but unwavering in his mission, he stormed through the doors and found himself walking right back into the debate hall. Determination became tinged with annoyance before bewilderment shoved them both aside. He turned on the spot and again headed for the entrance, his stride shifting from confident march to concerned sprint. He pushed his way through the doors again, and again he found himself back in the debate hall.

For almost the next hour, Kai tried every method he could to get out of the building. He tried the main entrance another half dozen times, and then moved on to back exits, employee exits, fire exits, bathroom windows, on and on. Escape seemed impossible. Eventually he discovered a closet full of blue collapsible chairs, and, since he could discern no productive course of action, he simply began grabbing them and throwing them, striking walls and furniture with them, stacking messy piles of them in doorways, anything to vent the fury within him that refused to die down. Angry rants and impassioned declarations quickly gave way to incoherent screaming and unintelligible streams of random profanity.

When vandalism had proven itself thoroughly unsatisfying, Kai decided to try another means of escape, though at this point he couldn’t really bring himself to believe it was possible. He dragged a chair with him to the main entrance and struck the glass to the right of the doors with the chair. The glass was thick and durable; perhaps not bulletproof but solid either way. It took several hits, but the glass cracked and then shattered outwards. Kai stepped through the hole and his feet landed in the entrance to the debate hall.

Emotionally exhausted, he stumbled forward toward the stage, but about halfway there he staggered to a stop and collapsed onto the floor. For a few minutes he just lay there, curled into a ball, staring blanking down the gap between two rows of seats. His fingers scratched idly at the short, prickly hairs on his recently shaved head as he tried unsuccessfully to just collapse back into the void he’d fallen into earlier.

He was on the verge of succumbing to sleep right there on the floor when the sound of footsteps hit his ears. He raised himself up into a sitting position just in time to witness a police officer enter the room, gun drawn.

With a sigh and a roll of his eyes, Kai raised his hands above his head. He wasn’t going back to that prison, if the officer could even take him out of the building, but he also sure as shit wasn’t going to get himself shot right now, after everything.

The cop looked left and right, craning his neck to look down into the rows of seats, but paid no mind to Kai sitting on the floor several feet ahead of him. He raised his police radio up to his face and reported “Still no sign of intruders”, then stepped forward slowly and began inspecting each row of seats as he progressed.

“Whoa, whoa, dude!” Kai yelped as the officer approached, but when the man’s foot went to land right on Kai’s crotch, it passed straight through and then he stepped through Kai as if he weren’t even there.

As the police officer moved down the aisle, still unaware of Kai’s presence, Kai stood up and vocalized his new realization with words only he could hear.

“Holy shit, I’m dead.”

A second realization followed right after, and Kai slammed one of the folding seats forward with an angry swing of his hand as he snarled “And one of those bitches killed me!”

The officer whipped around at the sound, gun pointed alertly at the still shaking chair as it settled back into its unoccupied position.

“Who’s there? Show yourself!” he called out as he cautiously reapproached the seat, stepping through Kai again as he did so.

“It’s Kai fucking Anderson,” Kai said derisively, waving his arms over his head, as the officer continued his investigation unaware.

As the officer persisted with his search for an intruder, Kai iied down on the stage and scream-sang whatever songs crossed his mind, the song choice pretty consistently veering into the profane and the explicit. He was well on his way through the greatest hits of Mindless Self Indulgence when the officer’s search led him out of the room, and when he didn’t return for another hour, Kai assumed he’d left.

Over the next couple of weeks, Kai did his best to occupy his time trapped in the building and out of sight of everyone within. His temper tantrum with the chairs apparently caused enough alarm that no one other than police entered the building that first day, but employees and visitors resumed their usual schedules from the next day onward.

Kai initially spent a lot of time continuing to harass and confuse the people around him. Rearranging furniture, turning off lights and computers, stealing various odds and ends from people’s jackets, purses, and briefcases, and so on. A few times people seemed to catch a glimpse of him, but Kai couldn’t prove that to be the case or find any reliable way to make himself visible. Eventually, he got tired of his unfulfilling poltergeist routine and settled into more voyeuristic habits.

He discovered a lot through eavesdropping conversations and looking at people’s phones over their shoulders. He’d returned to now ghostly consciousness just a few hours after his sudden death at Beverly Hope’s hands. Ally had orchestrated the whole scenario, and now she was surging in popularity amongst voters, particularly female ones. He’d pretty much exhausted his repertoire of misogynist slurs after reading that.

Most of the time, though, he spent staring out windows at the outside world he was now barred from. People passed by on the streets, seemingly without a care. No one saw him. No one seemed to even remember him. His movement, the fear, the pressure growing under the surface, the societal bomb he’d tried so hard to ignite, it all amounted to nothing. He sat there, looking out through the glass he couldn’t cross, and it seemed like all the rage and tension he’d set out to cause had relocated into his chest. Nothing he tried could alleviate that pressure, and he felt as if he could burst but instead he just sat there, on the edge of combustion and unable to save himself or simply explode.

Ten days into his afterlife sentence, he tried to kill someone, hoping that might provide some release.

He’d collected a jagged shard of glass from the window he’d broken that first morning. They’d since cleaned the other pieces up and replaced the glass, but he kept that one piece with him. He’d spent a lot of time just examining his own reflection or watching sunlight bounce off the surface. He’d also used it to carve some racial slurs into the backs of a few chairs. Someone had apparently been accused of being responsible and was fired, but Kai didn’t care enough to look into it.

On day ten, he found a janitor cleaning the mirror of one of the restrooms after hours. She sprayed some generic knockoff Windex onto the glass, wiped it clean with a washcloth, and suddenly there was Kai, standing inches behind her in the reflection. Of course, she didn’t see him, and he wanted to scream from the ruined opportunity to stoke a little fear like he’d used to. Feeling a little dejected, he swung the shard at the oblivious woman, and it cut a deep gash into her back and her left arm. She screamed, grabbing her arm with her opposite hand, and spun around to see what had happened. Seeing no one, she turned and ran out of the bathroom, calling for help.

The only other people in the building were a handful of other maintenance workers and a security guard. Kai could easily chase her down before she could reach anyone. To his immense displeasure, now that it was time, he just couldn’t bring himself to care enough to do so. There was no release, no pleasure in what he’d just done. There wasn’t guilt or regret either, but he just couldn’t find a reason to continue. He’d had such big plans, and the violence and death had always served what he’d considered a noble goal. He’d been burning down the world to build a better one from the ashes. Murdering some janitor was just pathetically pedestrian.

The security guard entered the bathroom soon after to examine the scene, and another police officer visited the next day for similar reasons, but Kai didn’t stick around to watch their pointless searches and their boring inquiries.

Over the next day, Kai watched the blood on the shard dry and darken. Then, he washed the blood off in a restroom sink, seeing no point in preserving it. He shook off the water, held it up to the fluorescent ceiling lights to watch the light reflect off of it again, and then he slit his wrist with it. He sat there, back to the wall, and watched blood drip from the wound for some time, until the flow became a trickle and then stopped. He sat there in a pool of his own blood for a while, and after some time staring up at the ceiling, he looked down to see the floor pristine and his arm unharmed. He sighed, dropped the glass shard into a trashcan, and left the room.

Halloween came a few days later. No one dressed in costumes or any notably festive outfits, but several people got into the spirit in subtle ways, with hairpins and tie clips and patterned socks. The day went by uneventfully, differentiated only slightly by the inclusion of Halloween topics into the usual dull small talk. By the time the sun set, most people had left or were preparing to leave, and Kai sat up on the stage in the empty hall eating a banana he’d stolen from someone’s sack lunch. He wasn’t quite sure how the logistics of eating as a ghost worked, but his usual crushing apathy kept him from dwelling too long on that train of thought.

“Hey, Kai.”

Kai jerked up at the sound, spilling his similarly stolen bottle of pomegranate juice onto one of his pants legs. In any other situation, his alarm would be at someone being able to see him. In this case, however, it was the familiar voice of the speaker that was to blame.

“Winter,” he breathed, stunned.

There, stepping onto the stage, was Winter Anderson, looking just as she had when he’d strangled her to death over a year prior. Kai rose to his feet as she approached him. She looked him over once and then reached up and pulled his shirt collar down slightly.

“Your shitty tattoos are gone,” she said calmly.

He was very surprised he hadn’t noticed that fact in the weeks he’d spent as a ghost, and he was very confused as to why that was her first observation, and he was very curious as to how she was there, and he was both overjoyed and deeply ashamed to see her standing there. With all of those thoughts and feelings fighting for a voice in his head, he couldn’t think of what to say so he simply stood there, mouth opening and closing almost comically.

“I’m not really sure how that works,” she continued. “I mean, my hair is still dyed. And we’re both wearing what we were wearing when we died. Seems kind of arbitrary. Are clothes part of us somehow?”

Kai grasped Winter’s shoulders tightly, as if doing so would steady himself.

He had so many things he wanted to say, and the statement that finally reached his lips was “Are you real?”

Memories of a zombified Vincent and of his spiritual advisor Charles Manson flashed before his eyes. Was he hallucinating? Could a ghost hallucinate?

“I mean, I’m dead. Thanks for that. But I’m also real, just like you. Welcome to the dead putz society.”

“Is Vincent a ghost? Did he-” Kai trailed off, still struggling to get a grasp on his words.

Winter sighed. “I knew it. Jokes just aren’t my thing. You spend more than a year stuck in your own crappy house, you get time to think and overthink this stuff. Lesson learned. No, I’m pretty sure Vincent’s not a ghost. You killed him in the same room as me, and I haven’t seen him at all.”

“How are you here?”

Winter turned and gestured vaguely outward. “It’s Halloween, Kai. The one night we can go anywhere.”

“What? You mean I can leave this hellhole?” Kai asked, already heading toward the exit.

“Until sunrise at least,” Winter called after him.

Kai raced out of the front doors and actually found himself standing on the sidewalk. The city smells and the cold air actually seemed nice for the first time in his life, or whatever you could call what he was experiencing now. He kicked over a public trash can, mainly just because it was there and he could.

“Having fun?” Winter asked sardonically as she followed her brother onto the street.

“Compared to being trapped in one place all the time, this is goddamn heaven,” Kai said, idly following Winter as she began walking off down the sidewalk. “There’s got to be some way to do this all year, right?”

“Well, ghosts are apparently stuck wherever they died most of the year. Halloween is when the ‘veil is weakest’ or whatever it is they tell kids at elementary school Halloween parties. As far as I can tell, there’s only one way out of it.”  
“What’s that?”

“Goddamn Heaven.”

Kai blinked in surprise and for a moment he again struggled to find words. “What?”

“Or Hell. I’m not really sure how it works, but it’d have to be a truly fucked up God to let us into Heaven, right? Although, what we’ve done, the state of the world, a fucked up God does seem to fit.”

“Heaven? Hell?” Kai had no idea what to say or what to think.

“I mean, you’re the religious studies major,” Winter replied. “Maybe you’ll get a nice piece of land in Purgatory or Hades or bardo. That’s a thing right? Is that an afterlife or a state of being or what?”

“It’s the period between two lives, not really a place,” Kai explained, momentarily happy to know what to say but very much wanting to steer the conversation back on track. “So three hundred and sixty-four days a year we’re confined to really limited spaces, but we can just pass on whenever we want anyway?”

“I think so. At least most ghosts can. I’m not really an expert here, but I do have one more Halloween’s worth of experience than you, and I found a few fellow spirits to fill me in.”

“So that’s why you showed up? You’re my ghost of Halloween past, here to drag me willingly off to Hell?”

A car drove right through them as they crossed the street. They didn’t feel anything, but it was quite disorienting.

“I’d be your ghost of Halloween present. I don’t have any special powers. That said, I am probably the most seasonally appropriate person for this job.”

Kai stopped walking. Winter turned to face him and received a glare that translated to “You’re dancing around the point.”

“You don’t know it’ll be Hell,” Winter said, a little more weakly than she wanted it to sound. In response to Kai’s skeptical expression, she added “We don’t even know if Hell is a real thing.”

“Ghosts are a real thing,” he replied as the pair recommenced with walking, mainly because Winter started moving, and Kai refused to let her just leave the conversation.

“One would think someone who had all those debates would know a simple logical fallacy,” Winter remarked. “Just because ghosts exist doesn’t mean Hell also must. What if there’s only a Heaven? What if it’s some third thing entirely? We could be reincarnated for all you know.

“Well, the goal of reincarnating to actually stop reincarnating.”

“Religious studies really shining through right now,” said Winter. “The point being, yeah, maybe we’ll go to Hell, but maybe we won’t.”

“What if we don’t go to the same place?” Kai asked.

His sister rolled her eyes. “I know you have this whole messiah complex thing, but if you really think I’d end up worse off than you **—** ”

“No!” he interrupted hastily. “I mean what if you end up somewhere nice, and I don’t?”

Winter eyed him up and down with a look of both surprise and skepticism. “Have you really been humbled that much by this?”

“I nearly knocked God off of His throne. When a revolution like mine is thwarted, the powers that be usually don’t let that slide. Paradise lost, literally.”

“You realize that’s about the devil?”

“Yes, but what is the devil but the greatest symbol of rebellion? When you **—** ”

Winter grabbed both of Kai’s hands in her own. ”Kai, please. It’s just you and me. I don’t need a sermon.”

Kai’s usual expression of confidence and charisma that accompanied his speeches broke almost as soon as it had reemerged. He opened his mouth to say something, but then something caught his eye, and then he tore his hands from Winter’s grasp and charged forward toward his new target.

The Butchery on Main. Ally’s restaurant, busier than ever.

Kai was cursing himself for throwing away that glass shard. No matter, though. There were plenty of knives in there. Fire, hooks, blades. He could bake Ally into a pie and feed it to her brat son.

All these pleasant fantasies were knocked loose when Winter grabbed his wrist and pulled him back. She wasn’t stronger than him, but it was enough to halt his advance.

“Let me go!” he protested, wrenching his arm free. “That bitch has to pay. This is a rare opportunity.”

Winter grabbed a handful of Kai’s jacket, and Kai simply shrugged out of it. Both of them paused for a brief moment to ponder the logistics of ghost clothes as Winter dropped it onto the asphalt.

“Ally isn’t even there. It’s Halloween so she’s going to be somewhere with Oz,” Winter explained.

“So we’ll track her down taking the runt trick-or-treating,” Kai proposed. “Or, hey, we track down Beverly and invoke some literal eye-for-an-eye.”

“First of all, she shot you a little above your eye, and secondly, that’s not what we’re doing Kai! I didn’t come to satisfy your fucked up revenge fantasies!”

Kai gave Winter a hard, inquisitive look. “You’re different. You never talked like this before.”

“I never talked to you like this,” Winter corrected. “You scared me, Kai. For a long time, even before we were killing people. And then you killed me. You looked me in the eyes and you watched me die. And you’d think that’d make me too terrified to look at you ever again, but it’s oddly freeing in a way. You can’t hurt me anymore.”

Winter’s hair had been disheveled slightly by their tussle, and Kai noticed bruises on her neck. He reached out cautiously to touch the area.

“I didn’t… It was Ally! She **—** ”

The moment his fingertips reached her neck, she reeled back and shoved Kai away by his face, her nails cutting lines across his cheek.

“Don’t touch me!”

Kai staggered back, touching his face and then looking down at the blood she’d drawn.

“You don’t get to blame Ally!” Winter shouted, shoving him back a second time. “Christ, I hate her too, but you do not get to deflect the blame on choking the life out of me! You can’t just throw out speeches about fear until the word loses all meaning anymore. You might think you’re above us all, a god among a bunch of white male dickheads, but now you’re just like me. For the first time in our lives, we’re equal. So grow some fucking balls and own up to your own goddamn mistakes.”

Kai looked stunned. For once, he couldn’t deflect an insult with clever words or quash it with an angry threat.

“...Sorry.”

Winter wasn’t sure she’d ever heard a genuine apology from him before. For once, he looked genuinely defeated, and still Winter couldn’t bring herself to find satisfaction in that fact.

She held her hand out to him. “Take me home.”

Kai took her hand, moving cautiously at first, and the pair began the trek to the house they’d shared not terribly long ago. At first they walked in awkward silence and then, after some time, Winter spoke.

“What happened to Ivy? You tried selling us that bullshit about cooking school, but I knew it was lies. I thought you killed her, but Ally said something that made me think maybe she did it instead. And then, once I was dead, I went into the bedroom you always kept locked, with Mom and Dad’s bodies inside, and there she was. Covered in lye, rotting away, in our house, and I never knew.”

“Ally killed her,” Kai said simply. “I don’t know the specifics. Just that she poisoned her. After she told me about it, we moved it into the bedroom to keep it under wraps.”

“I loved her, you know,” Winter said, her tone not one of anger or of sorrow but of a quiet, somber melancholy. “I know I fucked up. I know so much of how it started was wrong, but my feelings were real. You should have told me.”

“I didn’t know who I could trust.”

“You should have trusted me!” Winter objected. “Of all the people in the world you should have trusted me. Like I trusted you, right until you wrapped your hands around my throat. Even after, if we’re being honest. I’m here right now, after all. I didn’t have to stick around, but you were all I had. All I have, for whatever meaning you can apply to the present tense anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” Kai said.

Winter stepped slightly to the side to avoid a pair of young girls running down the sidewalk in matching ladybug costumes. Kai raised an eye at this action, walking through their pursuing, frazzled mother without missing a step.

“I killed Samuels, for the record,” she said. “Prick had it coming. He assaulted me, so I took his gun, and I blew his brains out.”

On the scale of things that mattered to Kai, that turned out to land pretty low. He replied with a disinterested “Alright then.”

The two continued in renewed silence for another minute or two, and then their house came into view. The pro-Trump political signs that had littered the yard were all gone now, and in their place was a large For Sale sign.

“They’re selling our house?” Kai asked.

“Well, we’re not getting any use out of it. Other than the fact that I spent nearly my entire existence there. And with you arrested and then incarcerated and now dead, apparently the cops don’t see any need in keeping it an open crime scene. They’re trying to sell it off now. It’ll probably end up with some serial killer junkie or some stray admirer of your cause. Or maybe just some family too poor to afford a house that hasn’t seen a few dozen deaths in the past couple years.”

They walked through the door, literally, and entered the house. It was all weirdly pristine, showing none of the wear and tear of daily living. All of their furniture was gone, replaced with a few basic tables and chairs here and there. Pictures on the wall and all the various miscellanea of their lives, all swept up and tossed aside. There was something Ally had said to him a while back, when he’d called her from a prison phone, that was rushing back to him.

_“Your sick, ugly, necrotic DNA will rot in prison until you die. And then it will be gone from the world forever.”_

All traces of his existence were fading away one by one. He was dead, and his whole family was dead. Every man and woman he’d reached with his message were dead, imprisoned, or just a bunch of sycophantic loners chanting idly along from behind a computer screen while he gave speeches and made plans and generally actually did something. At this point, all that would remain of him would be a pile of forgotten reddit posts and youtube videos, old news archives, and some empty seats at some family reunions. All his effort, and his biggest contribution to the world would be a few gravestones.

“It’s like we never lived here,” he remarked.

“There’s a few traces left,” said Winter. “They took the furniture and the photos and the knicknacks, but you have a habit of leaving an impression everywhere you go, Kai.”

She motioned to a crack in the wall by the front door. “There’s the mark from your fight with Dennis Farley back when you were in third grade. You caught him peeking on me changing in my room, and you chased him right out of the house.

“The doorknob to the bathroom is still a little loose,” she added, pointing down the hall. “From when you trapped Vincent in the bathroom for telling Dad that he caught you smoking pot. You left him in there for like four hours. And speaking of, I think there’s still a stash of aforementioned pot under a loose floorboard in the basement that the cops missed in their big sweep. You know, from back when you cared if anyone found out.”

“Thanks, Winter,” Kai responded, not sounding particularly reassured.

“And it’s not just you, if that matters,” she continued, half-joking. “There’s still a streak of missing paint on the wall of Vincent’s room from when he fell and pulled off that shelf on his way down, and I know there’s all sorts of little holes and scratches in my room from my amateur attempts at stashing away razor blades. And, of course, I think there’s a bullet hole or two in the basement that they didn’t get around to repairing.”

Kai raised his eyebrows in an expression of fake appreciation. “Thank God we still have the bullet holes.”

“And here I thought we only thanked you,” Winter responded, nudging him lightly with her shoulder as the two continued into the house. They reached the top of the stairs leading into the basement, but Kai stopped, halting Winter with a very careful and gentle hand on her shoulder.

“Not there,” he said simply, his voice betraying his emotions just slightly. It was unlikely anyone but Winter would have noticed it.

“Alright then. You lead the way.”

Kai led her into their parents’ old room instead. The former makeshift mausoleum now looked like any old bedroom again. No bodies, no lye. The flower on the door was even gone. Kai knew, logically, that the FBI wouldn’t sweep the building and leave a bunch of bodies behind, but it still hit him to see the bed empty. It wasn’t even the same bed, of course. He’d just gotten so used to having a place to go to see his mother and speak to her.

Kai sat on the foot of the bed and looked down at his hands, unsure of what to say or do. Winter lied down to his left, resting her head on the heretofore untouched pillow, and after a moment Kai leaned back and joined her. They stared at the ceiling, silent, for a full ten minutes before Winter spoke again.

“I saw you, you know, when you found out that I wasn’t the mole. That you’d never needed to kill me. I’m not sure I’d ever really seen you cry like that before.”

“Ally manipulated me! She **—** ” Kai began, but Winter cut him off, more calmly than before.

“I’m not trying to blame you for anything. It was nice, in a weird, bittersweet way, to see that you’re just a person. You’re not a god, whatever you think. You cry.

“I did too, when I found Ivy in here. She’d been right here, a wall away, while I wondered where she might have gone or what happened to her. And then I was dead, and I could walk right in here and see her. Her body at least. I don’t know what the rules are for who becomes a ghost and who doesn’t. She wouldn’t be here either way, but I spent all of Halloween last year looking.”

“I couldn’t tell you,” Kai said. “I couldn’t have you distracted when things were so important. We were gaining followers and making plans. Ally tricked me into thinking her brat was my kid, so I couldn’t have you turning on her. You were my number one, and I needed you sharp.”

“That’s bullshit,” Winter responded casually, not as an accusation but as a statement of fact.

“What?” Kai asked, leaning up to look his sister in the face.

Winter turned her head to look away, her white locks obscuring her face from view. “Do you remember, back when we were kids, how we’d tried to make up our own language? It wasn’t even anything real. It was basically Pig Latin, but we mixed it up, and then we added so many weird rules and quirks that even we couldn’t keep track of it.”

Kai placed a hand gently on her chin, so carefully and delicately that it seemed as if he thought she were porcelain. When their eyes met, she darted her gaze to look away again, but after a moment looked back up at him.

“What’s going on, Winter?”

She sat up, and Kai pulled himself the rest of the way up as well. The two sat cross-legged on the bed, facing each other, and Winter presented her hand, pinkie raised, without a word. Kai interlocked his finger in hers, and the two commenced in another session of their lifelong game of total honesty.

“Are you going to move on tonight? Into the light or whatever?” Winter asked, voice level despite the lone tear sliding down her cheek.

“Tonight? Why does it have to be tonight?”

“Because I know you. If you stick around you’re going to start making plans. Give it a few years and you’ll be leading an army of radicalized white nationalist Casper jagoffs in a Halloween assault on the state Capitol. You’re going to move on now, or you’re never going to move on at all.”

“What’s so special about tonight? Why is tonight my one window of opportunity?”

Winter scoffed, slightly uneasily. “Because I’m here. If there’s anyone who could get through to you, it’s me.”

Kai began to look skeptical. “So, what? Did you just stick around our house as a ghost for all this time just to escort me off ‘into the light?’”

“What? Can’t I care? We’ve always only had each other. You know that, and I know that.”

“And yet you basically attacked me on the street earlier.”

“Because you killed me!” Winter shouted.

Despite her visible rising anger, Kai remained calm. He was realizing something. He wasn’t quite sure what, but it was giving him something to work on, and that’s what he thrived on.

“You’re pissed at me. That’s understandable. But if you’re so mad, why still track me down?”

Winter disconnected her hand from Kai’s and raised it up to lightly graze his cheek with her fingers. “Your scratches are already gone. We don’t scar anymore.”

Kai made a move to grab her wrist but she yanked her arm away and rose swiftly to her feet. Before Kai could get off the bed himself, she’d already walked briskly out of the room. He followed her into the hallway, but she was already out of sight. He glanced into the rooms connected to the hall, as well as the kitchen and the living room, but she wasn’t there. With the potential options dwindling, he approached the entrance to the basement. He hesitated for a few moments, the memory of Winter’s dead body flashing through his mind, and then he descended the steps.

Seeing Winter sitting on the ground right around where she had died, Kai stopped at the foot of the stairs.

“Do you believe in Hell?” she asked, looking down at her crossed arms.

This wasn’t a question he was expecting. “I… I guess, yeah. When Mom killed Dad for all the shitty things he put her though, us through, the thought that he was burning away in some pit somewhere got me by.”

Winter chuckled humorlessly. “That sounds about right. I think death suits you.”

“I… what?”

“You’re getting more humble in your retirement from life. You didn’t give me some fucked up sermon about how you’re God, and so of course you know about Hell.”

Kai took a few faltering steps into the room. “Thanks? You seem to be oddly enjoying the idea of me as just some dude far more than me actually mattering.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Kai. I always believed in you.”

Kai, becoming used to finding himself at a loss for words, came to a stop a few feet from his sister. She turned to him, tear streaking her face but still failing to reach her voice.

“We’re going to Hell, right? Hell was made for us.”

“N-no! I mean, not you. Why would you **—** Maybe me, but...”

Winter stood up and closed the gap between the two. “Okay, now you’re starting to get maybe too humble. If you’re not a god, you’re the devil himself, huh? I’m not enjoying this new testament of yours anymore than the last.”

This time Kai responded with a mirthless laugh.

Winter continued, “We’ve both killed people. We’ve both done worse than that, honestly. I don’t think I’d ever get a better deal than you.”

“Winter, what **—** ”

“I didn’t stick around because you needed me. I’m scared. I’m an invincible, invisible ghost, and still I found something to be scared of. It’s just sad, huh?”

“Scared of what?” Kai asked.

“Context clues, Kai. Hell. Or worse. Or, you know, nothing. I just don’t know what happens if I let go. I’m fucking scared.”

“And that’s why you found me?”

Winter sighed and took her brother’s hand, not to recommence with their game, but simply to hold onto him.

“I need you to play fearless leader one more time. I need you to forget about followers and master plans and revenge and just take me into whatever’s next.”

A thousand warring ideals did battle in Kai’s head, but despite so many reasons to object and so many plans that still needed doing, the answer left his mouth easily.

“Okay.”

He led his sister by the hand up the stairs and out through the front door.

“Do you have any idea what’s about to happen? What it’s going to be like?” Winter asked.

“There’s one fact you learn pretty quickly when you study religion for more than ten minutes,” said Kai. “Absolutely no one knows any fucking thing about anything.”

“That’s oddly reassuring,” she responded, leaning her head against Kai’s shoulder as the two walked. “What are we going to do if we end up in different places? I mean, what if there’s fifty different Hells? What if who gets into Heaven and Hell is arbitrary, just to screw with people? Or what if...”

“If God put you alone in Heaven and me in Hell, I’d tear Heaven right out of the sky for you. Rip the whole firmament off the foundations,” Kai responded simply, as if he were discussing what they’d be having for dinner.

“You really fucking would, huh?”

Kai kissed her softly on her forehead, and then the two walked off into the fog together. In moments, they were gone, and the world kept spinning.


End file.
